Men, Women, and Work

Mary H. Blewett is a professor emerita of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her books include The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910-1960, and Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England.

Winner of the 1989 Herbert G. Gutman Award, 1989.  Winner of the New England Historical Association Book Award, 1989.  Co-winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association, 1989."Blewett challenges historians to incorporate gender analysis and a tradition of working women's protest into the history of the American labor movement."--Georgia Historical Quarterly "[Blewett's] detailed reconstruction of feminist perspectives in shoeworker protest and the divisions created by the competing loyalties to sisterhood and to working-class families is among the best available . . . With works like this, it should be impossible to write about the American working class without including women."-- Historical Journal of Massachusetts "A highly stimulating and rewarding book."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

• Acknowledgments   xiIntroduction   xiiiCHAPTER ONE   Origins of the Sexual Division of Labor, 1750-1810   3CHAPTER TWO   The Rise of Early Labor Protest, 1810-37   20CHAPTER THREE   The Social Relations of Production in the Rural Outwork System, 1837-45   44CHAPTER FOUR   Women and the Artisan Tradition   68CHAPTER FIVE   The Early Factory System and the New England Shoe Strike of 1860   97CHAPTER SIX   Crispin Protest in the Post-Civil War Shoe Factory   142CHAPTER SEVEN   Hard Times and Equal Rights, 1873-80   191CHAPTER EIGHT   New England Shoeworkers and the Knights of Labor   221CHAPTER NINE   Militancy and Disintegration, 1892-1910   267Conclusion   320APPENDIX A   The Accounts of Charles Fisher, 1837, and William Peabody, 1835   326APPENDIX B   The U.S. Census of Population: Lynn, Haverhill, and Marblehead, 1860; Lynn, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910   329Abbreviations   353Notes   355Bibliography of Primary and Unpublished Sources   425Index   431